Poetry's Rational Man was long ago shipped off to Understanding's rest
home, where for half a century he has quietly reminisced about the days
when things were as they seemed to be. Poets since then, obsessed by
various psychiatric worries and the sound words make when dropped at
random, have largely ignored poetry's old didactic chore: refining and
explaining experience. The occasional poet who addresses man's need to
know the lessons poetry alone can teach (Robert Lowell, for example)
has seemed remarkably clearperhaps even brave....